Just like your average high school senior, Luke Bowerman is counting down the days until he graduates. However, Bowerman is quite unique. He is “living on borrowed time.”

Bowerman was born with a heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. This congenital heart defect affects the normal flow of blood through the heart and occurs in about 5 out of every 10 thousand babies.

“I had a missing valve and a hole in my heart,” he said. The doctors were not able to perform a heart surgery immediately after birth.

Bowerman had his first surgery at 10 weeks old.

“The doctors apparently told my parents to just wait until I turned grey and blue and couldn’t breathe anymore and then bring me to the hospital for my surgery…basically when I was going into cardiac arrest,” he explained.

The surgeons patched the hole in his heart, which allowed blood to circulate better and gave Bowerman the ability to breathe a little easier. The doctors, however, were not able to repair the valve or any other problems because his heart was still in the process of growing.

The summer before freshman year, Bowerman had to receive yet another surgery. He underwent open heart surgery and the missing heart valve was replaced by a cadaver valve.

Surgery went smoothly and he was in school within a month.

But complications soon arose.

The heart repair did not last as long as the doctors hoped it would. It stopped working in August, the beginning of his senior year.

“My family noticed I was falling asleep all the time, I couldn’t stay awake, and I was just exhausted all the time,” Bowerman said.

This lethargy continued until November when we were finally able to schedule a surgery. On Nov. 20 2013, he had his third surgery.

“It was a new procedure called a Mittal V Heart Valve. It was not invasive. Going through an artery in my leg they used this weird device that snaked all the way up into my heart and then implanted two stints and then a third one that had a bovine (cattle) tissue heart valve,” Bowerman elaborated.

He was only in the hospital for 24 hours, but for 12 of those hours he had to lay perfectly still on his back so the wound would heal.

But what is another surgery without a little complication?

After being release, he arrived at home and a natural body function caused some unexpected events.

“I sneezed and it reopened the artery. I walked out of the car and fell against my dad’s and slowly walked into the kitchen. By the time I got there, I checked the wound and it was just spraying blood out like a garden hose. My sweatpants were soaked with blood and my shoes began filling up too,” he said.

Unable to go to the hospital because it was too dangerous to move him for fear of further risks, Bowerman took matters into his own hands…literally.

“I sat in the kitchen and put my fingers over the artery and clamped it so it would seal the artery again. I sat there for about thirty minutes until it stopped bleeding and then I passed out for six hours because I had lost so much blood,” he said.

He ended up getting a blood clot in his leg due to lack of professional care, but he had gotten the job done.

He will continue having to receive surgeries. His most recent repair is only expected to last 15 years at best.

“I see things in a different light, living with this defect,” he began. “I know I’m kind of just living on borrowed time, as is, but thanks to medical science I am able to live.”